Face by Bruce Gilden, begun in the early 2010s and developed across the Americas and Europe, portrays strangers whose faces and lives he understood as socially overlooked.
The project developed from Gilden's long-standing interest in police mug shots and from the close portraits of his earlier A Complete Examination of Middlesex. He often described the sitters as underdogs or people rendered invisible, while noting that they were not uniformly poor. In the book's accompanying essay, Chris Klatell presents these individuals as a counter-network to social media's polished, aspirational faces.
Surrounding streets and interiors largely disappear from the photographs. Faces fill the vertical frame, meeting the camera directly as flash and high-resolution color register wrinkles, scars, blemishes, makeup, stubble, tattoos, and uneven teeth. The close crop and frontal compositions create a compressed, confrontational mood, but the encounters differ from Gilden's better-known candid street practice. The sitters gave permission, leading the publisher to describe the images as "collaborative portraits." Gilden nevertheless retained control over framing and timing, seeking the intensity he associated with a face's capacity to suggest a story.
The project was shaped by Gilden’s use of a digital medium-format camera, which prompted him to return to color after decades of predominantly black-and-white work. He used a 70mm lens and direct flash to capture facial textures in sharp detail. Assisted-living facilities in Miami, state fairs across the United States, England's postindustrial Midlands, and locations in Colombia provided subjects. At the fairs, where a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship supported his work, he typically made only five to fifteen photographs per day. He intended the portraits for prints as large as 40 × 60 or 50 × 70 inches.
Dewi Lewis Publishing issued Face in 2015 as a 104-page cloth-bound hardback containing 52 color plates selected from photographs made in 2012–2014. Martin Parr selected it for photo-eye's Best Photobooks of 2015, while its severe proximity prompted continuing debate over whether consent and visibility counterbalanced the photographs' exposure of perceived imperfections. Works appeared in American Made at Leica Gallery Warsaw in 2016, Pier 24 Photography's This Land in 2018–19, and the 2020–21 NGV Triennial, which displayed four portraits. The series featured in A Closer Look at Kunstfoyer in Munich in 2025 and the Museo di Santa Giulia in Brescia in 2026. In Brescia, it was presented as Faces and included portraits made through 2024.
